Adrian Kavanagh, 20th February 2012
A new Constituency Commission report on election boundaries (for general and European elections) is likely to be published some weeks after the final/definitive population by area statistics for Census 2011 are published by the Central Statistics Office on 26th April 2012.
This post will consider what might happen our current constituency configurations if a 160 seat tally was agreed on for the next Dail and in light of the provisional Census 2011 population levels published by the CSO last year. While the Commission has a range of options to choose from between 153 and 160 in terms of seat numbers for the next Dail, the likelihood is they may opt for a seat tally towards the upper range of this as continued population growth may require seat tallies to be constantly changing if they opt for a seat tally at the lower end of this scale.
The key thing that the Commission will be watching for in this review are constituencies whose population per TD ratios fall outside the 5% variance limit – that is, whose population per TD ratios are either more than 5% above, or below, the state average for this (in the case of a 160-seat Dail, the state average would be 28,633 people per TD). In these cases, the Commission must consider whether they need to make changes to the boundaries/seat numbers for these constituencies. On past precedents, they may opt not to make changes if the level of variance is not much higher than this 5% limit (as happened in the case of Cavan Monaghan in both the 2004 and 2007 revisions) but they must make changes if the level of variance exceeds 7.89% – the maximum level of variance permitted by past commissions (Mayo East in the 1983 revisions).
So what might happen to our current constituencies in the light of the decision to reduce the number of Dail seats and the population changes outlined in the provisional 2011 Census population by area figures, if the Commission opt for a 160-seat Dail?
